To commemorate the Giants' final season at Candlestick Park, The Sporting Green offers a countdown of the 10 most memorable baseball moments in the park's history. The installments run every other Tuesday.

BOB BRENLY wrote a novel at Candlestick one day. He wrote it standing up, armed with a bat and glove. Like some great work of art, it had everything: crisis, conflict, a highly sympathetic character and a quirky finish -- an ending so ridiculously perfect, Hollywood would have thrown it back.

Most of the great Candlestick memories center on an epic victory, the postseason stage or an all-time Giant defining his stardom. This was just an ordinary man, on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, in a relatively meaningless game against Atlanta on the 14th of September, 1986. But if you happened to be there, you recall it right along with Mays, McCovey and Marichal.

"Years later," recalled broadcaster Hank Greenwald, "I ran into Roger Kahn (author of "The Boys of Summer"), and he mentioned that game. He happened to be visiting San Francisco at that time, and he never forgot it. He called it the Bob Brenly Memorial Game."

Brenly lost the game that day, or so it seemed, with four errors in a single inning at third base. And then he won it, methodically, over a two- hour span. As his game-winning home run sailed far into the fading daylight, he had gone from an outright butcher, a man playing defense with an anvil, to a mythical hero along the lines of Rudy, Rocky or The Natural.

Then-manager Roger Craig had founded the "Hum-Baby" concept that spring, handing Brad Gulden (a backup catcher) that time-honored handle and eventually building the team's entire philosophy around it. There has never been an accurate translation for "Hum-Baby." Sometimes it's just an infielder imploring his pitcher to put one on the black. Sometimes it's a cry from the dugout with the team six runs down in

the ninth. For the Giants, it was, "We play at Candlestick, and we love everything about it, and you'd better watch out or we'll win the whole damn thing."

And then came Brenly, crafting the best definition of them all. "Without a doubt," Craig says now, "that was the greatest Hum-Baby performance of all-time."

In a disturbing way, Chris Brown made it all possible. You remember Brown, the Tin Man of disabled-list lore, a man so notorious for phantom injuries and tepid excuses, even his teammates gave up on him.

Brown was the Giants' third baseman that year, but on September 1 at Shea Stadium, with a clubhouse full of irritable players and the Houston Astros starting to bury San Francisco in the National League West, Brown announced that his own season was over.

It wasn't quite accurate, as it turned out, for Brown played again. But when he begged out with a sore shoulder, leaving third base open and the Giants' fans disgusted, there seemed little reason to play out the string. This eclectic cast of characters -- Jeff Leonard, Dan Gladden, Mike LaCoss, Candy Maldonado, Mike Krukow, the young Will Clark -- had run out of steam.

But not miracles.

Brenly, a catcher by trade, wasn't at all thrilled about his third-base assignment that day. "Most infielders say they want every ball hit to them," says Brenly, now a popular broadcaster for the Arizona Diamondbacks and the FOX network. "Not me. I was thinking, 'Keep it away from me,' right from the outset."

They say the baseball always finds the man who doesn't want it -- the emergency shortstop, the pitcher playing right field, the out-of-position catcher. On this sunny, calm afternoon, Brenly was a veritable magnet in the top of the fourth.

First came a routine grounder by Bob Horner, and Brenly booted it badly. "No problem there," he said. "I expect to make one error a day down there."

The Braves wound up loading the bases, and Glenn Hubbard hit a little nubber down the third-base line. This time, Brenly not only dropped the ball, enabling a run to score, he made a hurried, off-balance throw at least six feet wide of home plate. With the runners taking second and third, that meant two errors on a single play, and three for the inning.

"At that point I was thinking, 'Please, don't hit me anymore,' Brenly said at the time. "I would have hid under the bag if I could."

That would have been a safe place to watch the next development, a screaming line drive toward Brenly off the bat of pitcher Charlie Puleo, scoring two more runs for 4-0. This one was ruled a single, too hot to handle, but Brenly was drifting into the Twilight Zone now, getting the chills as he realized that every single play was coming his way.

Fully shell-shocked, Brenly made his fourth error on a grounder hit directly at him by Dale Murphy. There was no further damage on the scoreboard, but when the team returned to the dugout, Brenly was a changed man.

"Bob was a notorious helmet- slammer," said Krukow. "A thrower of things. When he retired, they gave him the door to the dugout bathroom, full of spike marks and bat gouges from his tantrums. But when he came off the field that day, I didn't even recognize him. He just sat there in the dugout, stupefied. Totally numb. We all knew this was the most embarrassed he'd ever been in his life. It was like he'd screwed up this game so badly, it was beyond repair."

Four errors. Astonishing. "Believe me," he recalls with a laugh, "I could have made many more."

He now had a share of the major- league record for the most in one inning, and there had been a 44-year gap since the last episode (Cubs shortstop Leonard Marullo in 1942). But then Brenly began the comeback that separates him from everyone else.

First he homered in the fifth, breaking up Puleo's shutout. Then he delivered a two-run single off reliever Gene Garber in the sixth, tying the game at 6-6. He was now back behind the plate, thanks to a nice assist from Craig -- and when Brenly came up against left-handed reliever Paul Assenmacher in the bottom of the ninth, two out, nobody on, everyone in the ballpark felt the same sensation.

"Right then, I couldn't tell you who was pitching, what he was throwing," Brenly says. "It was like an out-of-body experience. Somebody was pushin' the buttons, and I was just responding."

It came down to a 3-and-2 count. Of course it did. Brenly, connecting with his higher calling, absolutely knew that Assenmacher would try the big, sweeping curveball he'd thrown two pitches earlier. It came right down the pipe, and Brenly's blast down the left-field line would have left two Candlesticks. It was one of the longest, hardest-hit homers he'd hit in his life.

"It was like the whole thing was preordained," recalls former Chronicle sportswriter George Shirk, who was covering the game for the San Jose Mercury News. "He hit that home run and thousands of fans turned to each other and said, 'Called it.' "

Brenly didn't know quite how to respond. "He never liked to show up a pitcher," said Krukow, "so whenever he went deep, he'd just quietly run the bases. But this time he did a funky little bat twirl. He wanted to throw it up in the air, in triumph, and he almost hit himself in the head with it (laughter). The whole thing was so un-Brenly-like. We were all laughin' our asses off."

Years later, someone noted the anniversary of Brenly's great day and said to him, whimsically, "In our minds, we staged a parade in downtown San Francisco this morning."

"Yeah, I was there," said Brenly, without missing a beat. "I was riding down Market Street in an Edsel."